hey everyone brian from Copeland's core fitness here and today I'm going to show
you one of my favorite drills for preventing lower back injuries and
helping to eliminate low back pain so for those of you who don't know I
suffered from severe lower back pain that shot down my leg and into my foot
for about a decade it was caused by two herniations or ruptures in my lower
back discs and I got to tell you it was
debilitating and awful now thankfully after that 10 years of suffering I was
able to figure out how to fix it and now I have zero back pain and I have zero
fear of re-injuring my back because I've created a supple strong mobile back that
is just very resilient against injuries and so today I'd like to share with you
one of the drills that I did to become like that just in case you're interested
in becoming like that as well but before we get into the drill let's
dig a little bit into why you need to do this drill and how your spine works your
spine has 24 vertebrae 7 cervical 12 thoracic and five lumbar each one of
these 24 vertebrae need to be able to move or your risk of injury goes way up
each one moves just a small amount and when they all move well they can share
the load but if an area does not move well then that means that the area right
above or below that area will be forced into moving more than it anatomically
should and that is where we get disc herniation and start feeling sciatica
pain okay so before we get into the drill I want to talk to anyone out there
who is currently in pain if you are experiencing severe low back pain before
you dive into this drill I want you to go very gingerly into it you might also
consider going and seeking out two people one is a qualified health
professional who can look at your back and find out if you have any actual
severe injury that needs to be treated more carefully
2 you can go find a Z health performance coach there's a lot of experience
working with low back pain who can help you work through this process and might
even be able to find additional drills that are more important for you now for
those of you who just have some mild pain currently I'm going to ask you to
do two things while you do the drill number one move a little bit more slowly
because often times that will help get rid of your pain and number two if you
need to reduce the range of motion that we're going to move okay here we go okay
here comes the drill first things first I want you to take your index finger and
put it just below the waistband of your pants next stack your middle ring and
pinky finger vertically like so and that's going to cover your lumbar spine
next once you just kind of rub those fingers up and down and what you're
going to feel are some bumps those bumps are your spinous processes which you can
see here and now we're going to give ourselves a little karate chop right at
the bellybutton now what I want you to think about doing in this drills we're
going to round our lower back and we're going to round over that karate chop you
might think about it as a fence coming up and hitting you right at the
bellybutton and you need to reach something on the other side of that
fence and you're just going to round from your lumbar spine and you're going
to feel your fingers spread open or spread apart as you do the drill now if
you don't feel it right away that's okay sometimes it takes a little while to get
used to the sensation of feeling it and sometimes it takes a little while to
coax those vertebrae into moving now since most people have very poor body
awareness of their low back because it's behind them and they also have very poor
movement quality back there it's inevitable that you're probably going to
find yourself making a couple of mistakes as you start doing this
movement the first one is you should not be able to reach
your kneecaps if you can reach your kneecaps then what's happening is you're
actually moving from your hips not your low back so a way that you can correct
this is you can put something right behind you you could stand with your
back to a wall and you want to have whatever it is a counter top or that
wall about an inch behind your butt that way if you move back and you hit it you
know that you're actually moving from your hips and not from your lumbar spine
the next thing that people are going to do is they're going to move from this
middle back area they're going to round from the thoracic spine looks like this
now it's great to have mobility in your thoracic spine but that's not the drill
that we're currently working on so as you do this to kind of take the movement
out of that thoracic spine I want you to think about keeping your spine straight
and stiff and only moving from where you feel your fingers touching you can rub
your fingers up and down and really pay attention to that sensation now back to
the hips for a moment since you are displacing your weight forward its
natural for your hips to move back just a little bit to offset your balance
that's okay but you can learn to distinguish the difference between this
and maybe your hips move back just a little bit for balance versus this okay
so if you're starting to get the hang of this you're starting to feel your
fingers spread apart you're starting to feel those bones open up beneath your
fingers now we can take a little bit further and add a little bit of rotation
so for instance here I am I rounded over that fence and cam cueing here cueing
back here round it over the fence and now I'm going to add a little bit of a
rotation to my left and a rotation to my right and this is going to add some
twisting in the lumbar vertebrae to get them to move
better here's where you need to look out the pelvis should not rotate because if
the pelvis is rotating the spine is not rotating so I want you to watch your
pelvis when you start engaging twisting and make sure that it stays straight
ahead if it twists okay fix it if it twists go ahead and fix it keep trying
to move from that lower back area okay so to wrap things up the next question
is how much how often the general recommendation is to do dynamic joint
mobility drills for three to five repetitions three to five times per day
so that might mean three to five of these bends and maybe three to five
little rotations three to five times per day now I myself I love to do them as a
warm up before exercise and before I play sports such as soccer or martial
arts incidentally I don't get lower back injuries probably a little correlation
and causation there however you could also do them anytime that your back is
feeling a little stiff maybe you've been sitting down for a while you get up your
back's a little stiff go ahead and do some of these drills it's fantastic for
you you really can't overdo them unless you
are currently in pain and you have a lot of inflammation going on otherwise knock
yourself out I probably wouldn't do more than about three to five repetitions
because if you start doing twenty and thirty reps your movement quality
normally goes down and next thing you know you're rotating and bending from
all over the place so just keep your reps low and do it several times
throughout the day if you want to do it more often now personally the version of
the drill that I just showed you is kind of my beginner version that I show a lot
of people I do a more advanced version called a front lumbar circle and you can
find this on a DVD set called the R phase and that's put out by a company
called Z health performance solutions if you are interested in preventing
injuries in every single joint of your body by creating suppleness and mobility
everywhere can't strongly enough recommend that you
include daily dynamic joint mobility work for every joint in your body
fingers to toes jaw everything in between as part of your regular exercise
program so I'll include include a link to that product down in the description
field and hopefully it'll be popping up here in a box in just a moment so anyway
folks until next time treat your body like a high-performance machine and go
do your daily maintenance which in this case dynamic joint mobility drills see
you next time
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét